ON NAMING CHARACTERS.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2012.

Questions for authors follow familiar literary lines. Where do you get your ideas? What made you take up writing? Who inspired your work? What bleak satanic pact did you sign in your or someone else’s blood, to get your work published?

   My ideas come from my mind. Where do your ideas come from? A sub-division of that area is the matter of inventing names for characters. How did you come up with that character’s name? In a few stories, I did away with names altogether. Characters took on labels. Canada Girl. Green Piano. Whatever. (All characters from ten tales of old japan*or lies if you prefer.)

   In other cases, I’ve been forced to use actual names. Shocking. This is the preferred method, avoiding the labelling of characters MAN ONE, WOMAN FIVE, ROBOT SIX, WOLF TWELVE, NON-WOLF ANIMAL EIGHTY-THREE, and so on.

   Gilach Mac Gilach, featured in Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords, derived his name from Alistair MacLean. That’s as complex as things need be, particularly if writing fiction that ends up labelled as fantasy.

   Newsflash kiddies. All fiction is fantasy.

   My advice, which you are free to ignore, is to keep things as simple as you can. Veer from the straightforward, or easily-explained, and you may hurt your readers’ brains. Fantasy and science fiction writers like to run amok with syllables. It’s in their synthetic blood.

   Science fiction and fantasy vied with crime and adventure as I read novels and endless short stories. I wrote science fiction, fantasy, crime, and adventure as a result. Though I soon reached the conclusion that I detested the labels fantasy and science fiction.

   The terms fantasy and science fiction were used by publishing companies to foist badly-designed book covers on a semi-suspecting public. I haunted the library, ignoring the book covers and paying attention to the stuff between those covers. From that, to this.

   Only in fantasy and science fiction do writers truly run amok with syllables. The trouble with throwing in multi-syllable fantasy or science fiction names is the exponential generation of utter clutter. This is often evident in newspaper summary pieces for science fiction television shows.

   THIS EPISODE: Furqha’ha’un Biguen prevents Gharspace from crumbling at the edge of the Kloeiultizar Zone. Over in the Dvbeeinharbaux the Zakwey initiate Krakaduim against the Verlikiliki, while Warketoid Vumnish delays dealing with the Sapakoinub J’Haren – with tragic results.

   Yes, for the English language.

   You have to nail a lid on that. Then pour concrete on top. And drop a lead block on the result. With more concrete to follow. Throw in some garlic, just in case. Then erase the hard drive and take a magnet to it before hammering the construction to destruction.

   I’m always left with the feeling that I’m not quite sure who did what, to what. It’s often quicker just to watch the episode, and discover that a rogue loner hero blew up something he shouldn’t have. Threatening dire consequences which never materialise, or are easily explained away.

   Looking at the stuff I’ve published, you’ll see that I occasionally develop a theme in naming characters. Whip Walnut takes his name from chocolate. Other characters in Walnut’s story have nutty names. Being bloody obvious is no crime. It’s another way of being thematic, and appearing grown-up.

   Patti Smith provided inspiration for a character. No one sued me. I had an idea for a story featuring Kim Basinger. No one sued me. I turned James Ellroy into a criminal character. With his record, there’d be no point suing me.

   You do want to watch out, when inventing characters and passing out names. There are a lot of telephone directory characters running around in fiction. James Bond came off the front page of a book on birds. Ian Fleming was looking for a bland name for his hero. He found one. Fleming went to school with Scaramanga, and turned that annoying person into a villain.

   Do I do that? No. People who piss me off don’t make it into my fiction. I refuse to immortalise them. Many writers cheerfully fold, spindle, and mutilate their foes in fictional form. I don’t waste the energy. Well, whatever sees these people through the night…

   Characters take on more character with the addition of certain sounds. I lost track of the comic book villains created by Stan Lee. Many of those ended up with the letter K in their appellations. The hard C or K sound goes rather well with imagining villainous activity in the possessor of a crunchy name.

   Quick poll. Dracula. Frankenstein. Heathcliff. The letter V also features heavily in villainy. Score double points if you name a villain Viktor or Vladek. Add a few points if some form of rank provides a hard crunchy sound. Comrade Colonel Rosa Klebb.

   In my story about Whip Walnut, the hero doesn’t have those hard crunchy sounds. His adversaries have them. The Kernel. Coconut Shy. There’s no way to get around the hardness in a heroic name, if the name adds character. Albert Crabbe. So villains don’t have a monopoly on those sounds.

   What heroes tend to have a monopoly on is the name JOHN. Usually, not exclusively, coupled with a surname that starts with the letter C. You may argue that it’s a coincidence that the future messianic hero of The Terminator is John Connor. That the Holier-Than-Thou hero of medical drama er is Doctor John Carter. Okay. Argue away. I’m not convinced by coincidence.

   Jason Bourne is a character who deliberately shared initials with James Bond. That was a dig, on the part of one author. Any more contenders? Jack Bauer. Another nod in Ian Fleming’s direction. I suspect Jim Beam does not fit that pattern.

   How good does a hero have to be, based on name alone? Angel. The Saint. Characters with good built into their names. How devilish a villain can we create, going by what I’ve written so far? We’d need to throw in a rank or title.

   Crime Controller Doktor Viktor Khaos-Karnage, KMD. That last bit doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just another way of sneaking an extra K into the name. He’d need truly villainous henchmen. I imagine they’d have to be cohorts of his. Red ones, at that. The Crimson Cohorts of Crime Controller Doktor Viktor Khaos-Karnage, KMD. Available for weddings, births, funerals, and all points south.

   Ruined by choice? You could always stick to bland labels. Hero. Villain. Secondary Villain. Though introducing a Traitor, Double-Crosser, Stoolie, Snitch, or Psycho-Bitch may tip your hand a mite early in the proceedings.

   Was I really stuck when I called two characters by the same name in slim*thriller…opting to have MacLean and MacLean investigate murky doings? No. I expect a lot from my readers. You are stuck with my decisions, get on with it.

   Awkward names for fictional creations? Do I really need to explain the inappropriateness behind Fanny as a character’s monicker? In America, fanny is used to describe a person’s backside. Elsewhere, it isn’t. Leading to uproarious laughter whenever an American calls a bum-bag a fanny-pack.

   I’ll gloss over unfortunate book titles that come to mean something different when offered for sale in countries other than the author’s country of origin. Authors themselves may fall foul of this cross-cultural problem. Well, that’s just too bad.

   Shall I give advice on naming characters? Have I already given out advice? I’m not entirely sure. Here’s a solid piece of help. There’s nothing to prevent your naming a character James Bond. Just avoid giving him a hatred of women, love of the booze, and a penchant for murderous violence. That may lead to litigation.

   Make a character’s name easy to spell. Unless you employ great use of the technology. In which case, call the hero BUTTER all the way through the book. Then nail him to the page at the editing and formatting stages.

   Find and replace BUTTER, so that your man becomes Feiliks Kharkeyovich Votamoidhanolski instead. Unless he’s the villain. At that point, elevate him to the rank of Comrade Colonel. Or Kernel, if you’re feeling silly.

   Finally, be prepared to lie to people you know.

   “That Sam Smithson, the axe-killer, who happens to have your distinct laugh, taste in lumberjack shirts, and love of unsweetened coffee? Of course I didn’t base him on you, Sam. Coincidence. Look at the hero, Abraham Lincoln. Didn’t even know there’d been a President by that name. I did no research whatsoever. Made it all up. Honest. Not as honest as Honest Abe. Er…”

   Though you should be aware that you may have to lie in the other direction.

   “That Sam Smithson, the axe-killer, who happens to have your distinct laugh, taste in lumberjack shirts, and love of unsweetened coffee? Of course I based him on you, Sam. He gets all the best lines. His humour is derived from yours. Hell, that dirty joke in chapter three was lifted word-for-word from that dinner-party you hosted in the depths of winter. No, I won’t be giving you a cut. Sam. Where did you get that axe from?”

   Some people like that sort of half-arsed tribute. Naming no names. (That’s probably for the best.)

NEXT BLOG: THE WINDOWLESS WOOD-PANEL ROOM.

NEXT BLOG.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2012.

This next blog is written before the release of my second Amazon Kindle book. I am gambling that I will have the thing ready for D-Day. My first Deployment-Day was chaotic. I managed to stay calm. Did the job. Four hours after I pressed the button, Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords went on sale.

   Now it’s the turn of INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS, which I published just before I posted this blog. LYGHTNYNG STRYKES is out next, six weeks from now if all goes well. (Whenever NOW is, given that I’m writing ahead of the game.) Then, I’m faced with decisions.

   Commit to a genuine formatting war in carving four volumes out of one story, illustrations and all. Revisit old material. Or? Write something new. Tackle more stories about Neon Gods. The Chalice in the Snow is set for publication in a short story collection. That gathering goes by the title Neon Gods Adrift in Mist. Unless I change my mind, and call it The Chalice in the Snow and Other Tales. (Or, being Scottish, Ither Tales.)

   I could knock out a short story every week, for a volume like that, and stop when I feel the book’s large enough to go on sale. And I could still work on other things, or ither things, besides. Decisions. I may just be making those decisions as I type.

   So far, I’ve managed to stick to the initial plan. Write six blogs and post those in the run-up to my book’s publication. Follow that by repeating the formula. Write six more blog posts in the run-up to publishing a second book. For my next trick, it’s the same trick. Keep blogging. Write six final blogs, and put out book three.

   Then what? Shut the blog down while I take stock? That seems likely. I could blog weekly, turning myself into an internet version of Alistair Cooke. It never occurred that I’d follow in his footsteps, yet I’ve done that.

   I doff my hat to Cooke for having invented his own job as he went along, and for having held on to that job decade in, decade out, until retirement was forced upon him. Death will do that to a writer. Cooke held tenaciously to his place in broadcasting. The longer he held on, the more likely that his place in broadcasting became a place in broadcasting history.

   There’s an obvious lesson to be had from that. He did repeat himself. Impossible to avoid. Embrace the fact that you will repeat stuff. This is called creating a style. These days, it is also known as developing a platform.

   What do I hope to achieve by blogging? I hope to gather an army of fans who will feed me. Kind strangers will provide sustenance by purchasing my fiction and furnishing me with handy paper tokens which may be exchanged for goods or services. If that army swells to actual army-size, my war-chest will pay for exotic trips to locations which would then feature heavily in my stories.

   Cooke observed the world, and gave his radio audience glimpses of that world. He met Duke Ellington, and was present when Robert Kennedy was shot. For my part, as a mere constructor of this blog, I’m no great observer as Cooke was. I was simply once part of Cooke’s audience.

   So I’m no Alistair Cooke. And I’m no Studs Terkel, or Harvey Pekar. Though, like Harvey, I have dabbled in the world of the comic book. Albert Crabbe has a comic script attached to his name. As does Julio Mud. The cover art for INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS was meant to be part of a comic strip.

   It was always my intention, from the moment Karen Woodward thumped me over the head prodded my career as a blogger, to write selective blog entries that I’d collect and publish alongside my fiction. This, I have now done. Are these blogs worth reading? Of course. You’d expect me to say that, for two reasons.

   One. When it comes to my writing, though critical of it, I cannot avoid being biased. Two. As I sit typing, I read the words aloud. Shades of Alistair Cooke, there. He was speaking to a radio audience. I speak to myself, and the worms in the walls, just to keep a lid on sentence-length.

   What level of planning goes into a blog entry that’s bound for a collected edition further down the line? Should I lie, and say that I read up on Alistair Cooke and his work? I listened to his work while he was alive. All I did was check the spelling of his name. I did this by summoning the memory of the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

   Cooke’s television work was spoofed as Cookie, with the monster in the role, reminding me that the broadcaster’s name ended in an e. Yes, that’s what passes for research in this blog. Be thankful that I apply these high standards on your behalf.

   I also struggle, heroically, with the punishing limitations delightful quirks of Microsoft Word. My wild flailing superb typing ability comes in handy, too. I considered being as grumpy as Harvey Pekar. No one on the face of the globe, Pekar included, could be that grumpy and live as long as Pekar did. You must accept my curmudgeonly nature with a mountain of salt.

   Does this make it difficult for the accidental reader to deal with my sense of humour? Of course. I managed to type that with a straight face, even though I was reading the words aloud in a high fluting tone – mimicking the speaking style of H.G. Wells.

   For no reason other than that I could. If nothing else, it added (that is to say, padded) a paragraph. Though I set out to collect my pre-publication blogs in a book, I didn’t sit down at the keyboard with the express intention of ensuring every proclamation became the Statement of the Age. That way, madness lies.

   This blog entry has been the most disjointed, in the writing. I find that I must tear myself away from the typing now, to see to my dinner Lofty Affairs of State. That last swipe was not true. In this part of the world, dinner is what other people call lunch. The main evening meal is not called dinner, but tea.

   Not to be confused with the drink. Which is also called tea. To confound the issue, it is possible to have tea with your tea. My wild flailing fingers admirable typing skills added a t to the end of the first tea in that last sentence. I do check this stuff for errors of that nature.

   Though I do not check in silence. Typing in the foreground is inspired by music in the background. I won’t always have music playing as I write. Generally, something is burbling away. Perhaps I’m looking for a sense of mood, or atmosphere.

   Maybe I’m revisiting music I haven’t heard in a little while. The soundscape of typing is no longer the thunderous rattle provided by the manual typewriter. It has softened from rattle to clatter. What do I listen to, as I type? Voices inside my head, is the short answer.

   I battle, constantly, to replicate human speech-patterns in text. Casting runes onto the blank page. I listen to music, too. Movie soundtracks, if I want to concentrate on the unfolding tale. Songs by artists who love to sing impenetrable lyrics, if I don’t want to be caught up in the words.

   Occasionally, I’ll decide that there’s something in a song that is of direct consequence to what I’m writing about. Windows Media Player allows me to set up my own playlist, tailored to the way I think a story is going. I have a playlist set for my Hamlet adaptation. Half an hour of music.

   There’s another playlist for Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords. Specifically attuned to the stories of the past. Almost 90 minutes of material. Not one song connects to the main plot featuring Gilach Mac Gilach. The playlist was created for the tales in Sir Bradwyn’s section of the saga.

   I still have the cassette I cobbled together for that, back in the day. The technology has improved somewhat. Now I’m looking at the actual playlist for Neon Gods. Twenty minutes of music that I use to visualise a few scenes from the book and several scenes from future tales of past exploits.

   This musical swirl reminds me of the original inspiration for the villainous King Valentyne. The Battle of Evermore was a collaboration between Led Zeppelin and Sandy Denny. There’s a clear mention of a tyrant. Valentyne the Tyrant was born. He became Valentyne the Conqueror. Then he switched to his final title. Vortigern the Tyrant. I just couldn’t shake the tyrannical character conjured up by that song. So the villain stayed.

   I used the song that followed The Battle of Evermore as a continuation of inspirational themes. In Stairway to Heaven, the lady who buys the stairway to heaven becomes the Red Queen in my stories. This is on the fourth Led Zeppelin album. Yes, the untitled one.

   The Battle of Evermore inspired scenes that led to the start of the war between Vortigern and everyone else. A war he thought he’d won after a year. Stairway to Heaven was a song I used to form images of Sir Bradwyn, old beyond his years, dozing by a fire. Remembering the final battle.

   A fight he barely wins, as Robert Plant sings about being a rock. With the lady herself, her kingdom, and all her people, lost in the deluge of a defeat that drags most of her foes down with her. Does this mean anything to my readers? It needn’t.

   As I’ve stated elsewhere, sources of inspiration are meaningless. Here’s the playlist. Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. The Battle of Evermore. Stairway to Heaven. Kashmir. Charlie Big Potato. Kashmir. (No Quarter.) The Battle of Evermore. (No Quarter.) Stairway to Heaven. (How the West Was Won.) She Moves Through the Fair. Road to Your Soul. Scarlet. Only One Reason. Drowning.

   Led Zeppelin songs to start with. Charlie Big Potato is by Skunk Anansie, all Paranoid & Sunburnt, conjuring images of the tragedy relating to the Fair Elaine and her brother the Knight of the Glass Shield. Then it’s familiar Led Zeppelin stuff performed by Page and Plant or done live. After that, from She Moves Through the Fair on, music is by the band All About Eve featuring the haunting tones of Julianne Regan. She’s a MASSIVE Beverley Craven fan.

   Irony. Look it up.

   There’s a song in which Julianne’s spectral voice is buried under layers of technology, to great effect, and that inspires a scene I’ve not yet committed to paper. The song is Phased, and the scene involves alteration of the perception of time. That song’s on a separate playlist dominated by Annie Lennox. Those songs do inspire scenes from Gilach’s side of the story told in Neon Gods.

   Sparks fly. I’d like to say I didn’t listen to any lightning-based music while writing LYGHTNYNG STRYKES. Shelter from the Rain is another All About Eve song, and uses the phrase lightning strikes again in the lyrics. Lightning is a Thea Gilmore song that played merrily away as I typed. But tales of lyghtnyng are for another tyme.

NEXT EVENT: BARRING GREMLINS, A SECOND BOOK IS DEPLOYED.

BREVITY. SUMS IT UP NICELY.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2012.

Yes, I suppose I should say something about the impending release of my uncollected short story collection. I vacillated over whether STORIES should be in the title. As I decided to put my pre-publication blogs in the book, I couldn’t class those as fiction. WORKS replaced STORIES.

   You gather scraps, as a writer. Stories with no home to go to. Wayward tales seek shelter under a log. Suddenly, this ragtag band of orphans becomes something more. Or so you like to tell yourself. I could have put every scrap in the volume. But no. I had a long think, about the short story.

   Why write short stories? Well, that was the done thing in school. We were exposed to the concept of writing fiction and not taking all day at it. Now I devote myself to writing fiction and taking all day at it, for money.

   There is a view that it’s important to progress from writing the short story to writing the novel. A contrary view is that you can just jump in and write the novel if you want to. (Third view. Devoting yourself to short stories is no crime.) I feel that chapters of novels are short stories, or should be. Something meaningful goes on in a chapter. That’s the point of isolating part of the story in a chunk.

   What is something meaningful? I’ve read chapters of books that had nothing plot-related go on across the pages. Atmosphere can provide something meaningful in a chapter of that stripe. Perhaps all the action is happening elsewhere, and having nothing plot-related going on inside a chapter is simply the author’s way of stoking tension or interest in what must, inevitably, follow.

   In the short story itself, there’s no follow-on. Unless you come up with a sequel. You will see that happen inside my book. It’s not against the rules, for there are few rules in fiction. What are those rules? Avoid boredom. Be consistent within the confines of any fictional world you create.

   Creating a world across fifteen pages or fifteen-hundred becomes a question of how much space you wish to cover. The short story, in school, often hovered around 300 words. Translated to print, that’s a single page of A4, double-spaced, in a 10 pt font. More or less.

   A page.

   Would I write a short story that short now? If I felt like it. I don’t generally feel like it. If I want to write a short story, I’ll scribble a few thousand words rather than a few hundred. This blog has a minimum limit of 1,500 words. Enough space in which to say what I feel like saying. If I were to write a short story as a blog entry, then, yes, the story would meet that minimum requirement. And some vague maximum limit.

   How long can a short story be, before it is no longer a short story? I’d still call a piece of fiction a short story at 15,000 words. That’s something I could write in a day. We’d have to draw on other terms, from the wilderness, to help define a sense of scale. A novel hovers around the 75,000 limit.

   Do we simply apply labels on the basis of the 25,000-sized chunk? Novel, 75,000. The novella, 50,000. Extended short story, 25,000. Short story? Everything beneath that lowered limbo-bar, down to the pub joke or fortune cookie declaration.

   Short stories. Do they sell? How do they sell? This is the digital age, and there are many options available. A story could be released into the wild on its lonesome. That serves as a taster. Would I charge for that? Perhaps if I put out a series of single tales.

   You can read a free taster on my Hallowe’en page. One day, I’ll edit The Chalice in the Snow for inclusion in a collection. There won’t be much editing done to it – I have very few alterations to make to the piece. When it is released, it’ll be the collection you’re paying for rather than that story. (I’ve now edited The Chalice in the Snow. Tidied a few sentences. That was all. The version on the blog remains unchanged.)

   How would I package my short stories? Single release? Collection in a group of six? Another flock, in a group of a dozen? Some overlapping, from one collection to the next? Bumper gathering of 20+ tales? Overlapping again? No, I don’t think I’m going to duplicate tales across collections.

   I see advantages in the notion. A collection of rocket ship stories. Another gathering of horror tales. One piece of fiction is a rocket ship story and a horror tale. So that appears in both volumes. Transparency is important if you are going to offer customers your stories in that way.

   Mark the collections clearly. Itemise and advertise the inventory for the benefit of your would-be readers. Don’t short-change customers, and don’t leave them feeling short-changed either. Otherwise resentment creeps in, when having to pay for the same mutant-monster tale five times in a row.

   On a side-note, I’ll add that naming a collection of short stories WORLD’S BEST TRICK-ENDING TALES is not a great ploy. Unless you have a greater ploy in mind. Similarly, your HERO UNMASKED AS THE VILLAIN COLLECTION, and ORDINARY STORIES FEATURING THE UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL OF ZOMBIES, may alert readers to some of the surprise twists you have in store. On the flip-side, WEREWOLF TALES better have werewolves in there. Or be tales told by a werewolf, at the very least.

   The appeal of the short story takes on a new lease of life in our digital age. Readers of this blog could be reading the blog on a phone, on a train. (How did the phone come to land on the train?) We may define the shortness of a short story by whether or not it is consumed at a single sitting on a train journey.

   It would be uncharitable of me to suppose that you could chomp through the complete works of Tolstoy on a single train journey in this part of the world. I am here to talk about writing, not about interminable train trips in the Wild West of Scotland.

   Brevity, as Dorothy Parker has it, is the soul of lingerie. It is also the spine of the short story. Get in, write what you have to, and get out. The exact number of words involved is unimportant. Atmosphere is what you are after.

   I don’t think I ever read a Mark Twain book that felt like a book. Tom Sawyer and his rascally pal Huck Finn will always inhabit the landscape of the short tale, to my mind. Drifting along the river, chapter by chapter. Maybe it’s the way Twain wrote. Well.

   There are countless forgotten novels whose only impact on my life was the removal of hours that could have been spent more profitably. Over the course of a few pages, using a curious mix of mist and words, Akutagawa gave the world a short story that ranks as one of the most atmospheric I’ve ever read. And that, filtered to me through the Japanese-to-English translation. In a Grove. You may have encountered the story as a movie called Rashomon.

   In a Grove is such a short short story, that I pause (briefly, how else) to consider editing short pieces. How to edit a short story? The same way a large story is edited. Electronically, using features of the word processor to iron out the few rough spots on the shorts.

   Microsoft Word has many features to it. A few are even considered useful. I vaguely recall OVERTYPE mode being something you could switch off FOR ALL TIME™. In one of Microsoft Word’s previous lives, at any rate. That handy ability, of permanently dispensing with the bloody annoying thing, no longer appears to be available in this particular incarnation. For the sake of brevity, we’ll pretend my 95-page rant on this topic never existed.

   My rant must have been edited from the blog, but how? Swallowed by the red circle, obviously. An esoteric cabal, set up in the era of your choice. If you want to concoct stories about a covert society, that is. THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLE.

   I use a Microsoft Word circle, filled red, to mark a point in my work. This electronic bookmark serves one purpose. To note the progress of my editing. On the off-chance that I’m torn away from my writing to deal with the drains, or other world-shattering events, I mark the latest edited point with that red circle.

   As I move down pages, I drag the red circle with me. When I reach the finish, I delete the red circle. Whether I’m writing a novel or short story, the red circle crawls across the pages in search of matters that require fixing. Mistakes do not quite fall into the red circle’s gaping maw. A fair bit of prodding goes into that circus act.

   I see, by the enchanted bean counter attached to this machine, that I am at the finish. Though, in drawing attention to that fact, I have, miraculously, padded out another paragraph. Consequence? In going back to tidy some typing, I accidentally activated OVERTYPE mode. Not, I fear, for the last time.

NEXT BLOG: NEXT BLOG.

SECTARIANISM.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2012.

On casual examination, it seems that –ism is unpleasant. Fill in the blanks and add your own jokes yourselves. Ice creamism, taken too far, can have appalling consequences. My plan is to publish INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS six weeks after I published Neon Gods brought Down by Swords.

   There’s a story in my uncollected collection concerning sectarianism. Bigotry. I can say little of that story here – for the story is short. And I determined that direct commentary on the tale should not exceed the length of the tale itself. See the book for details when it comes out.

   I can say more on the general topic. What is sectarianism, with special regard paid to the Wild West of Scotland? It appears to have something to do with football. I have no interest in football (no, I’m not a Motherwell supporter, thanks for asking), and, for that reason, find the football angle difficult to fathom. The details are hazy. I suspect the background goes something like this…

   Rangers is a Glasgow football team in blue, whose members would play on blue grass if they could. Rival Celtic (pronounced Seltic, and not Keltic), is a Glasgow football team in green – known as the most famous Irish team in Scottish football.

   The teams are described, collectively, as the Old Firm. Or, translating for the weegies in the audience, Rah Auld Firrrum. Weegies are Glasgwegians. That is to say, inhabitants of Glasgow. Pardon me while I turn into Stanley Baxter. (Google him, or run a search on Parliamo Glasgow.)

   At a distance, and at no distance at all, it is difficult to describe the footballing landscape. Is there a thin veneer of football coating bigotry, or a thin veneer of bigotry coating football? Rangers versus Celtic. One team against another. Protestantism versus Catholicism.

   Is there a difference between Protestantism and Catholicism? Both are versions of the same religion. Christianity. In the Wild West, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. They are sects, and sectarianism is little more than the act of following sects. Or following football teams which act like sects. Can you detect a difference between Protestant and Catholic?

   Yes. At a glance? Oh yes. With the utterance of a phrase? Oh yes indeed. On the streets of Northern Ireland, the matter is determined by courtesy. Man crosses street. Car approaches slowly. Man glances at car. Driver pauses, and signals that man may cross safely. Man crossing street notes Catholicism or Protestantism in the driver. How so?

   If the driver signals by raising two fingers, he grants the Pope’s blessing. A raised hand, however, is the Red Hand of Ulster. That’s a very Irish example. Another is determination of religious persuasion by study of the manner in which a stamp is placed on a letter.

   In Northern Ireland, a man who thumps the stamp into place is Catholic. For he bashes the Queen’s head on that stamp. The Protestant resorts to excesses of saliva in affixing the stamp – licking the Queen’s arse.

   An old piece of ill-humour. Stamps needn’t be licked, now. (While stamps and letters last, in our digital world.) Forget crossing the street, or licking postage stamps. The Scottish example comes in an utterance. Whit skuil did ye go tae?

   Asking which school you went to is another way of asking whether you went to a Protestant school or a Catholic school. In truth, through all the years I’ve pondered this strange question, it always seemed to me that it was simply a way of asking if you went to a Catholic school. The question itself marks the questioner as Protestant. A subtle distinction often lost on the questioner.

   Bigotry is on my mind. Our overpriced parliament passed new legislation against bigotry. Specifically, a framework of anti-bigotry law designed to stamp out bigotry in and around football grounds. I wondered if my fiction would fall foul of this new legislation. Then remembered that, as someone with no interest in football, I could not be charged under the legislation even if someone took offence on reading my short story.

   We may come to call that lack of interest in football the Motherwell Supporter Defence. I am joking, of course. (There are supposed to be two Motherwell supporters, on display at Edinburgh Zoo alongside other rare specimens.) The new legislation does allow for freedom of expression. In short, if I write and publish a story about bigotry and sectarianism, and make comments deemed offensive by some, my right to artistic freedom is not affected.

   What I say in the story is said as a commentary on sectarianism and bigotry of all persuasions. I need not fear having my collar felt by the polis. What sort of unsavoury activity occurs at football matches? Ah. You mean on match days. Not just at the match.

   For the supporters of Rangers, every football game is a game against Celtic. Rangers versus Celtic? That’s a game against Celtic. Motherwell versus Celtic? That’s a game against Celtic. Rangers versus Motherwell? That’s a game against Celtic. Germany versus Narnia? That’s a game against Celtic. (Narnia has a great centaur-forward and a cracking centaur-half. You couldn’t have resisted making the joke, so stop groaning.)

   Every game is a game against Celtic. This stokes tension on every single match day. The Celtic supporters see things that way too. A game of Celtic versus a cloned Celtic team would still be a game against Rangers.

   If you think everyone is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day, remember this. Every Celtic supporter is Irish on a match day. That level of loyalty to a Scottish team blows the Scottishness away. This stokes tension on every match day.

   I don’t know if Bobby Sands MP ever had a chicken supper. He was one of ten IRA men who starved to death as part of a campaign of prison hunger-strikes. An attempt to turn prisoners into political prisoners. Why mention him here?

   On a match day, you could board a train in the Wild West of Scotland and hear SHE’LL BE COMING ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES. With different words. Typically, you’d face a gang of drunken supporters further up the carriage, chanting, COULD YOU GO A CHICKEN SUPPER, BOBBY SANDS?

   Quite what the fuck this has to do with football is beyond me.

   On a side-note, I feel it important to stress that the likelihood of the train slowing, or coming to a halt for technical reasons, is greatly increased by the presence of drunken singers. A slow train on a wet weekend, with rain pelting sideways off the windows, practically cries out for drunken musical accompaniment. Welcome to the all-singing, no-room-for-dancing, West Coast chorus line.

   Other songs. About famine. Instructing the Irish that it’s time to go home. This is a dig at the Irishness of the Celtic team. The Potato Famine, an event so cataclysmic as to require capitalisation, did not just affect the Irish. However, as they were worst-hit, the disaster came to be known as the Irish Potato Famine.

   In Scotland, the Highlands and Islands were also severely hit by the potato famine. So the famine is too close to home. Yet 1840-era Irish immigration in the wake of the famine is still used as a stick to beat the Celtic supporters with…at a distance just shy of two centuries.

   What of the Celtic side of sectarianism? The other face of a cloudy mirror, reflecting nothing but bigotry in equal measure. Irish Republican Army songs. Usually, though not exclusively, about some brave young broth of a bhoy who took a perfidious English bullet in the heart all in the name of The Cause.

   However, I would add that you’ll still be hanged in some parts of the country for singing about your darling Clementine if you do so with an Irish accent. A song about a miner in the Gold-Rush, lamenting his lost love, seems to have taken on the aura of Irish post-famine politics and a lament for the Old Country the miner had to flee. With another century-plus addition of political and pseudo-political baggage to weigh the song down.

   Yes, Rangers and Celtic supporters need reminding that Celtic is a Scottish team. True, fans of Rangers and Celtic occasionally need reminding that the eleven-man Celtic squad is not the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. There are so many wind-up merchants on both sides that they should start a clockwork toy company. It would do very well.

   Will the new legal framework dampen the tension in religious bigotry? Very hard to say. I’m always inclined to ask how many of these people actually go to church. But then, if I asked which church do you go to, I might be accused of bigotry.

   As for the story. This story that could lead to my arrest if my work is considered outwith the right to freedom of artistic expression? It makes my commentary in this blog seem tame. You’ll just have to read the book to find out more.

   Taking my leave of you, I will caution genteel readers of this blog. The topic under discussion may attract a swarm of vituperative comments. Simply because every football game in Scotland is a game against Rangers/Celtic. (Delete as applicable.)

NEXT BLOG: BREVITY. SUMS IT UP NICELY.

Update. The Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012 was repealed in 2018. If anyone were offended by my comments concerning Motherwell supporters, well, it's too late to seek a prosecution now.

AUTOMATION.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2012.

Running my vast publishing empire in my own tiny mind, I must, occasionally, leave the public library my top secret volcano base and execute incompetent minions deal with other things. In order to accomplish mass-slaughter tidy files, I am forced to rely on a vast robot army the automation of this blog.

   Blog automation is not new to me. I’ve yet to blog weekly, in putting out this weekly blog. Instead, I rattle off a series of six pre-publication blogs in the build-up to the release of weapons of mass-destruction one of my books. For the release of Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords, I wrote six blogs over a two-day period. To me, that’s a form of automation in itself.

   Then I threw those articles up on Blogger. There they sat in the bomb-bay, waiting to be dropped. I would sit on my Throne of Evil™, and deploy each blog post using the Switch of Nefarious Activity®. What if I had to embark upon emergency evacuation of my secret volcano base?

   With the library unexpectedly shut, or the network down, I could always use my mobile phone to hit the Switch of Nefarious Activity®. Writing blogs in huge chunks is a form of automation just shy of the real thing. With my top secret volcano base undergoing winter refurbishment, I’ve opted to use the vast robot army for the first time.

   My Plan B on D-Day, when I went to publish Neon Gods, was to deploy the book on Amazon by using the mobile phone if the library were closed to me. That fall-back plan never came up. What would I do, with the library shut over the festive period?

   I’d automate this blog. Blogger is free. Fantastic. Blogger is free. Not so fantastic. You get what you don’t pay for. I’ve learned, the hard way, of Blogger’s limitations. Eccentricities. What to do? Rise to the challenge. If you are in a position to read this on the 2^nd of January 2012, automation was a success. Unless I had to run around in the background, working the failed robot army from my mobile phone.

   Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

   Are there peculiarities arising from automation? I hope not to be hit by a bus while the blog is automated. Naturally, I hope not to be hit by a bus. Reading an automated blog posted by a deceased individual would be no stranger than receiving a letter from someone who died after posting it. That’s for those of you who still write letters. We all have the potential to become akin to light from long-dead stars.

   This train of thought leads to publishing books. The body of work I’ll be remembered for, if I am to be remembered at all, is unwritten as I type. As I type, © has a hold over my fiction lasting 70 years beyond my demise. Readers may be perusing this long after I am dust, and those readers will, themselves, be dust in the minds of later readers.

   We leap off the page, and from beyond the grave, to reach those who find our writing strange and familiar in the same breath. In this blog I have written of typewriters. Obsolete? Nothing which can be depicted in a story is truly obsolete. The typewriter is growing into little more than a movie prop, it’s true. That’s still useful.

   Over the past month I’ve been hit, from all sides, by a statement that people have stopped sending e-mail. Do I feel compelled to explain to the young persons that e-mail was once a system for…no. E-mail? You only see that in period dramas. How quaint. Remember those days.

   Everything we write lies in tomorrow’s dust. I could write three blogs a day, and do other things with my day, storing up 21 blogs a week and unleashing one. Putting me 20 ahead, 20 ahead. Automating the whole thing, I could disappear for years and not be noticed as missing.

   Depending entirely on the content of my blog posts. I could, coincidentally, just happen to write about current events – giving the impression that I am operating in the here, the now, even though the topic discussed was one written about in an earlier year.

   Keep it vague enough, and I could get away with it. Perhaps I’m getting away with it now. Did you catch the news? That was predicted in last month’s blog. (Written five years ago and three before the author died.)

   We are fast becoming the activating agents who may no longer be needed for the purposes of activation. Our pre-recorded TV shows and automated updates roll on whether we are there to observe them or not.

   I’ve shopped in places where I had no human contact. That is neither a good nor a bad thing. I once stayed in a hotel in which I didn’t speak to a single employee. The queue for the desk was long. I saw no queue at the automated check-in kiosk. There, I typed a number and was issued with my plastic keycard. I wondered, idly, if I’d ordered the breakfast service after all…would I have spoken to anyone then?

   How convenient is convenience? In the time it took me to check in automatically, no one else was checked in at the human desk. I had to fight my way through the tail-end of the manual queue after dealing with the automatic process.

   It is still customary to state destination when stepping aboard an omnibus. Unless a pass is proffered. The pass handles the transaction. Beyond that, leaving the bus calls for a standard farewell to the driver. In this part of the world, that’s use of the word cheers.

   How far can we get through our lives without human contact? Agents of automation that we’ve become. We can get surprisingly far, in embracing the technology. For many, it’s harder to cast the technology down. Ask someone to go a day without a mobile phone, and you will get through that day having engaged in human contact. Or, at least, I suppose you will.

   A recent example of human contact made me suspicious. Once chip and pin came in, using cards to spend unseen money became so much easier. For a time, the old method sat alongside the new method. Shoppers still had to sign for things occasionally.

   That all stopped. I had to buy cards, from a card shop. Yes, I know. I could do the whole thing online. Sometimes, you are called upon to handle personal things for the older generation. I use the phrase to make myself feel younger. It’s not a ploy that works.

   I had the card ready, to pay for the cards. Could I sign for it? My antique brain summoned the file from memory. Yes, that’s right. We used to do things that way, didn’t we. But…why should we do things that way? I had to ask.

   The explanation I received was strange, though it made sense given the setting. In a card shop, the card reader accumulates glitter from the cardboard cards on sale…affecting the plastic cards with their chips and pins. So, there was always the old-fashioned way.

   I was suspicious. The suspicion evaporated. Glitter. In a card shop. Human interaction. An actual signature. When was the last time I signed anything, in ink? I’ve had to append electronic signatures to gadgets when signing for parcels. No ink required. Signing my publishing deal with Amazon, I didn’t sign anything at all. A click of a button, and I was in business.

   Publishing with Amazon has been a fairly human-free operation. Only when I asked questions of the publishing-team, did I receive answers. Much else was automated. For all I know, Amazon has bots answering publishing questions. I should develop a set of questions, Turing-style, to determine whether or not the unseen correspondent is likely to be artificial.

   In four non-negative words, how red is a notion? What is the non-opposite of opposite? Are these your incriminating marked banknotes? If pink is Taiwan, how many meals make five beans on a Sunday with no thought of fishing to mind except the thought of no thought of fishing to mind?

   That sort of thing. Though bots are growing more sophisticated, and could work around easy puzzles like those. I should ask questions about tax. In pretending to ask questions about tax, I may have given the game away. Am I completely automated myself? A robot, capable of asking questions about tax? No human would stoop so low. Though it’s hard to say whether robots might.

   This blog entry has been automated to take the pain out of adding the entry by means of mobile telephone. Regular pain, experienced on adding the blog by conventional means, has not been affected. My top secret volcano base is currently undergoing winter maintenance. Though this message started out as not being automated, by the time it reaches you it will be…

NEXT BLOG: SECTARIANISM.